Share this

Read more!

David Cameron announces his resignation as Prime Minister in the wake of the UK vote on EU membership.24 June 2016. Wikicommons/ Tom Evans. Some rights reserved.

As part of our Looking at Lexit series, we’ll be asking left-wing Brexit
voters about their reasons for voting Leave. Our second “Everyday Lexiter” is
Niall, a 50 year-old Glaswegian running a social enterprise.

1. Describe your
political outlook/background/loyalties.

Traditional celtic lefty with a strong
belief in ‘from each according to their means to each according to their needs’
with an emphasis that everyone, no matter their needs is expected to also make
a contribution. My socialism considers public sector mandarins to be on the
same side as the capitalist elite and that genuine accountability needs to be
as local as possible.

1.2 Describe, in
two or three sentences, your political utopia: what would your ideal community
look like, and how would it function?

Everyone should make a valued contribution
to their community in accordance with their abilities and everyone should be
supported by their community in accordance with their real needs. Accountability
is held at as local a level as possible. People are entitled to use their
talents and effort to gain advancement and wealth but must be regulated to
avoid exploitation. Society should value fairness and appreciate tax as a means
of creating happiness. The class that a person inherits should not be the
defining factor in their capacity to accumulate wealth and power.

2. What was your
main reason for voting for Brexit? Do you remain happy with your decision?

I experience the EU’s primary objective as
the facilitation of global capitalism. The labour laws, regulation and social
‘development’ policies of the EU, while on the face of it progressive, were
shown to be a façade by the EU response to Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain
when the financial crash happened. Essentially I feel that wealth, power and
influence were increasingly being concentrated in the hands of big business,
big finance, big politics and big bureaucracy.

3. Were you
influenced by any politicians? Friends, family, colleagues?

Definitely not, I found the politicians on
both sides of the argument nothing short of disgusting and the framing of the
debate as appalling. Family and friends were universally remainers, largely in
reaction to the racism and Brit nationalism of the Brexit campaign. They all
felt uneasy about my arguments and while they could agree with many of my
criticisms of the EU they felt obliged to vote remain.

4. How do you
feel a Labour-led Brexit would differ from a Tory one?

Not sure, I no longer trust the Labour party
as a result of the fact that, when in power, they sided with the rich and
powerful and were apparently content for everyone else to get by on credit and
welfare. No matter who is leading Brexit, I think that we need to expect and
prepare for any deal with the EU to be difficult as the EU elites have a huge
investment in Brexit being a failure. We should therefore anticipate fiscal
contraction and use it as an opportunity to empower communities to take more
responsibility for their wealth, welfare and well-being.

5. How do you see
the UK in five years’ time? How do you see Europe?

I hope and expect that the UK will be more
federal, if there has not been Scottish independence. I expect that its
international status will have declined and that we can use our strengths and
talents to serve our communities rather than being obsessed with projecting
power.

I don’t believe that the EU is sustainable
in the long term but do expect it to be resilient in the short and medium
terms. Without fundamental, cataclysmic change then the imbalance between the
rich north and poor south will continue to grow, leading to increasing
resentment.

6. On that note –
how did you vote in the Scottish independence referendum?

I was an initial no voter as I despise
nationalism, however I became a yes voter as the indyref campaign went on. The
independence vision being put forward was politically progressive and
fundamentally civic rather than tribal. I would definitely support a much more
federal structure with as much power being devolved as possible.

7. What would
have to change about the EU, or the UK’s relationship with the EU, for you to
support continued or renewed membership?

Whatever I say to this question would be
unrealistic and sound naïve. It is in the nature of organisations that power
becomes concentrated in the hands of a few and they are unlikely to agree to
reforms which would make subsidiarity genuinely meaningful as evidenced by the
contradictions within the Maastricht treaty; reasserting the rights of member
states while creating economic and monetary union. How did that work out for
the Greeks?

openDemocracy has worked for two years investigating the dark money driving Brexit. We have many more leads to chase down, but need your support to keep going. Please give what you can today – it makes a difference.

Related

This article is published under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. If you have any
queries about republishing please
contact us.
Please check individual images for licensing details.